The year I disappeared

The story underneath the practices, the hardest and most transformational thing I have lived, and how we came to what actually works.

You have mostly heard from Bob in this space. This time it is me, Thomasina.

This is the most personal piece I have written for you. It is also the most difficult, and the most transformational experience I have lived through. Thank you for reading it, for sitting with the layers, and for letting me introduce myself, and us, a little more openly.

Let's dive in. About thirteen years ago I was a shell of who I am now. I was worn down by a demanding career in social services that had shown me layers of the human experience no one should have to live through or witness. While I carried that work I was also a mother to two small children who spent most of their week in daycare. Bob and I had to relearn who they were as people and individuals at the start of every weekend. It was its own kind of torture, and it wreaked havoc on my mental health. My tendency towards rumination, OCD, and anxiety came back at a level we were not prepared for and, honestly, could not recognize at first. OCD can be sneaky when it slithers through the mind without showing up as the classic, visible compulsions. Every familiar OCD fear found its way into the parade of my very active and sticky thoughts.

As a result of my symptoms I went on medical leave one day before our youngest broke his femur. The universe was making space for me to evolve whether I chose it or not. I put my own recovery on hold to care for our son, and once he was well enough to be at home without me, I entered a partial hospitalization program in the metro that focused on mind-body wellness and group therapy. It was a new program, still working out some of its kinks, and it was truly the only place that could have helped me.

Talk therapy for OCD and rumination is often ineffective at best. It can help to have some psychoeducation, to see how triggers and responses work. But digging around inside the obsessions and the worry loops is only fuel for the fire. The obsession gets bigger, or more obscure. The behavioral groove gets deeper and more worn in. This is true of ordinary anxious thinking too. The more you travel a loop, the more automatic it becomes. And yet, we can change once we become aware of what we are doing and where we are placing our attention. We can change once we understand how the body shapes the mind and how the mind shapes the body. We can evolve once we understand that the tools are already within us, and that we only need to learn how to use them.

The therapists and teachers in the program knew a handful of basic techniques to offer, a path they hoped would work. With my history, I did not believe an SSRI was the right medicine for me, but I had to take one to stay in the program. The young psychiatrist increased my dose faster than he had ever done with anyone. (His words, not mine.) I was on the highest amount of prozac possible within about a week. There were consequences. I experienced brain zaps, a sense of not being present, emotions that did not match my thoughts and strange physical side effects. It was trial and error, mostly error. The one thing that genuinely helped was an old, gentle medication that, in a small dose, helped me sleep. And without sleep there is no recovery.

For almost six hours a day, over about 3 weeks, I sat with one hand on my heart and one on my belly, breathing, and waiting. Waiting for what? I could not have told you.

Then one day it happened. Someone in the program had found a little bat outside and asked if anyone wanted to see it. I said I would go, being a lifelong lover of wild things. When I came back into the building, the therapists and the staff behind the desk knew something had shifted before I said a word. One of the therapists began to say that I had beaten the medication. She caught herself and covered the slip with something else, but I had already heard it, and it was all the confirmation I needed to move forward. The breathwork had changed my internal state. I had walked into that program knowing there was another way. What I needed was to feel that it was true.

Through all of this my mind and body were so tormented that I moved through many of the larger symptoms you hear people speak about only in whispers. I moved through dissociation, obsessions and ruminations that broke my heart. I experienced a high level of anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, depersonalization and thoughts of not wanting to be here at all. I had dropped to a weight that frightened us both. I was disappearing. The team told me later that they almost didn't keep me in the program because of how severe things had become. It was my tenacity and determination to heal that held my place. If you know me at all, tenacity is not something I lack.

Learning to truly witness and feel these states, to move in and out of them, became the most expensive master's degree in the human experience a person could hold. Bob and I became genuine students of the nervous system. We began to understand the feedback loops between body and mind, of trigger and response. We learned how to become the witness to a thought or a feeling instead of its captive. Most importantly of all, we understood the incredible value of attention. Always, attention.

It is amazing how the next chapter, the one you may have come to love, began to fall into place from there. We knew we had to change our whole life. We sold our house and moved our two young children into an old Class C RV, and we pointed it west. We explored. We woke up in new places. We got good at adapting. I found yoga in studio after studio across different states, taking in what different teachers and traditions had to offer. In one of those studios, a teacher who was almost always late for class brought out an instrument I had never seen, a simple wooden box that made one sustained tone and a vibration that filled the room. She encouraged us to “Om” along with the sound, simple yet monumental. Around that same stretch of time, while Bob was traveling in Peru, he came across the very same instrument in a completely different context. When we found our way back to each other at the campsite where the RV was parked, we both started talking about this curious, humble instrument that had quietly moved something in us. (If you haven’t figured it out yet, it was a Shruti box!) It felt as though the world was conspiring in our favor, or in yours. We eventually ordered the best one we could find, and we have cherished it ever since. Has it fallen down stairs, banged through doorways, and tumbled out the back of the car? It has, many times, like a cat with nine lives. It carries a few dings and dents now, and every one of them tells a story.

After about 6 months of exploring we landed back in Minnesota and were invited to our first extended sound meditation, the kind of gathering you only hear about through someone who knows someone. I went the first night, to a session held for women. I cried through the entire thing. The sound and the vibration let my thoughts slow, and at moments go quiet altogether. I came back to our hotel room and told Bob we needed a gong. He went the following night and came back saying the very same thing. We are musicians ourselves, so this was not a hard sell. So we sold the RV. We put it toward yoga teacher training and purchased a gong with what was left. Many of you have sat inside the vibrations of that same gong, and my goodness, she is wise and full of surprises.

The path keeps unfolding. We are always evolving, still students of it all. And here is the thing I wish to convey with a passion. It matters enormously that the person you work with understands these states from the inside, through their own lived experience. We lived it. It is not something we could have learned from a book alone and been any good at. Our work has always been steeped in psychology and mental wellness, and that did help us put a name to the symptoms, literally, while they were happening. But naming them is not the same as moving through them. Moving through them happens in the body. It happens through attention training, psychoeducation, personal development, mind-body practice and through the plain drive to keep growing. The recalibration happens in the body, by making room for an emotion without the story attached to it, and by remembering that we have sovereignty over our own attention.

Many of you have come to us for coaching through your own transitions, your mental health, your evolution, and it has been one of the great honors of our lives to walk that path beside you. We love the moment something clicks for you. We also cheer you on when you simply show up, ready to do the work, however that looks on the day. Especially on the days you arrive a wee bit crabby, tender or triggered. You show up curious anyway and often by the end, you feel lighter. You are more rested, heard, seen. You made room to set the armor down.

For a long time I only told this story to other providers, or to friends, and only when it seemed to fit. It has become clear to me that this story now belongs with all of you. I trust you. And if you are in a wiggly or rocky stretch right now, I hope some part of this is a small comfort. We have room for all of it. Come at us with the big stuff.

This is the first of several pieces where I will share more of what we learned inside this experience, one thread at a time. For now, thank you for allowing me to tell you where it all began.

Big Love, Thomasina

P.S. If you are in a hard place right now, you do not have to be in it alone. Please reach out.